“Fine,” I rejoined, “but don’t blame me when your son has a health emergency induced by corpulence.”
“Is that another leftist crack against our brave troops?” he snarled. “Why just corpulence? Why not lieutenants, or even generals, too?”
“Not corporals,” I replied wearily, “‘corpulence.’ Someone who is corpulent is overweight, like, for example, the thirty-two percent of Americans labeled obese by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”
Moments like these left me wondering why I couldn’t have been an only child.
Don’t misunderstand, I love my sister. And she’s not stupid (her acceptance of Dolton’s marriage proposal notwithstanding). But just like her husband and millions of other Americans, there’s no thinking involved. I wasn’t sure which was worse: Apolitica, who (intentionally) knew zilch about politics, or Dolton, who gladly offered his deeply held political beliefs -- just as soon as he got them from Rush Limbaugh.
A hit piece on universal medical coverage, followed by a jingoistic U.S. Border Patrol segment, droned from the TV which, naturally, was tuned to Fox News. My brother-in-law, true to form, snorted about “socialists” and “wetbacks” undermining America.
I had a thought. “Dolt, considering your meager health insurance, what would you do if one of you did need medical attention?”
“Good question,” he snapped, “since all those illegal aliens you and your commie friends love so much are jammin’ up the emergency rooms. It’s bad enough they take all the jobs.”
Good ol’ Dolt: the human echo chamber for right-wing wedge issues.
“Hmm. And you’ve been working six-day weeks at Harry’s House of Hubcaps for how long now?”
“Twenty-four years!” he replied proudly, as if somehow it made him a real American to work his ass off for a quarter century while losing ground daily.
“How are your wages and benefits there?”
“Lousy,” he grumbled. “It’s all those Mexicans they’ve hired and -- ”
“And how were they,” I interjected, “when you started working there in 1983?”
“Uh…not that great,” he mumbled, finally.
“So, then, tell me: do you think your dismal employment situation is the fault of immigrants, undocumented or otherwise, or perhaps instead of bottom-line corporations that deliberately use cheap labor to suppress pay and other benefits?”
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